STORY ARCHIVE

More than 10 years ago, Dr Ove Hoegh-Guldberg proposed that just a 1 or 2 degree rise in sea temperature would be enough to wipe out the Barrier Reef and was awarded the Eureka Prize for Research in 1999. At the time he was howled down by many in the international community.

Dr Ove Hoegh-Guldberg

TRANSCRIPT

Prof. Ove Hoegh-GulbergI've had a love affair with the ocean for my fifty years. When things started to change there was a great sadness that came into my heart because it seems almost impossible that something like the Great Barrier Reef should be threatened on that vast scale. Mass coral bleaching , first appeared in 1980. It hadn't been recorded before then. By the end of the 90's we'd had several really major events culminating in 1998 where sixteen percent of the coral reefs died. What we found with coral reefs was that it only took a very small change in temperature, one or two degrees above the summer maximum, to cause the bleaching event. And at first this seemed incredible, you know a tiny change like that can wipe out a reef?I asked the question how would this change if we took the projections of sea temperature into the future. And I got a real shock. Coral reefs may actually not exist on the planet in 2050. And of course that was quite controversial.It attracted a lot of people in the community saying, we'll I don't think so, I, I think evolution could take care of this or I think reefs will migrate and so on. I was a young scientist then and I wasn't that experienced with controversy and so it was a bit daunting. Professors banging on the door wanting an explanation, for you know, what am I saying…

In the thick of the debate and when I was least expecting it out of the blue comes this, which was the 1999 University of New South Wales Eureka Prize for scientific research. This really was a reason to keep going, that it wasn't all lunacy and that at the very least I had something that was worth exploring as an idea.Since winning the Eureka prize in 1999 I, I still publish, you know twenty or thirty papers a years with my, my group and, and we're very actively involved in the science.

“This is normal coral and this is bleached coral “.

But what's changed is that I'm not only looking at the fundamental science ideas but looking at them in the context of the wider significance to society.

We've expanded our studies to, to look at the interaction between coastal ecosystems and humans. There's a region called the Coral Triangle, which is the richest part on the planet in terms of biodiversity. It has forty percent of the coral reefs of the world. It has huge mangrove and sea grass systems. But what's really important about this region is you've got a hundred million people living in a coastal zone completely dependent on those resources. But what happens when we start to unravel the support that these ecosystems can give, like mangroves to those societies? And ah, the answer when you lay a metre of sea level rise, you increase sea temperatures, is that you largely lose most of those ecosystems. And of course that has huge implications for food security in that region. The impacts are going to be huge and the number of people that will be unsettled as a result of those impacts is going to be enormous.

This is not a political debate, it's gone way beyond simply debating the science of whether or not we should act.

Al GoreWe have to act.

Prof. Ove Hoegh-GulbergWe're very fortunate to have ex Vice President Al Gore ah, coming out to launch Safe Climate Australia.

Al GoreSome truths really are inconvenient ...

Prof. Ove Hoegh-GulbergWe only have about ten years left in which we can um, choose between one fate versus another. It's a, it's a distinction between a world in which climate spirals out of control versus a world in which we'll have challenges. But we'll able to survive as a society and as a global people. I think it is important that we recognise science you know at all levels and we keep stoking what is really essentially a very important part of, / society and progress. You know stoking the fires of innovation. Ah and ultimately that's the solutions to the future when it comes to climate change.